Gold Investment

[MountainDon]

Archival gold CD-R's and DVD-R's that is.    I've spent hours yesterday and today archiving digital photographs and videos from the past two years. I have tried to keep up and do this every January, but somehow I missed last year. Gold layer disks are supposed to be the best for longevity. Some say 100 years, others say longer. The way I see it they'll last at least until the next system for saving digital data comes along. Then everything can get copied over.

Maybe I'm paranoid because as well as the CD's and DVD's I have also got at least 3, mostly 5 hard drive copies of everything considered important. The disks get saved in a fireproof resistant safe.

Anyhow if anyone is interested in keeping back up copies of family imagery and "papers" look for gold archival CD-R or DVD-R disks. ou can get them in inkjet printable form as well as regular. I used to use Kodak gold until they quit selling them. I now use Delkin. Amazon.com has various vendors selling them.

[glenn kangiser]

I just bought a 500 gig WD Passport backup that runs off of the USB power cord.  Bought it from Costco.  It backs up everything on the fly after the initial copying and setup.  I did it because My HP laptop is now giving me smartdrive warnings of it's second Seagate 120 gig hard drive failure.  At least it's only the data drive.

[MountainDon]

That's a good idea; one can never have too much backup. Most people have zero. I probably go a tad too far in the other direction. 

The laptop (single drive) reports (copies) to the desktop every two hours, as well as whenever it begins the shut down process, copying any changes over there to drive D. The program I use can be instructed to save certain files, omit others.

The desktop copies any changed files on it over to each of two of the Seagate stand alone backup drives as well as another internal drive on a separate disk controller. That's programmed for every 3 - 4 hours. The desktop uses a motherboard with a RAID controller set to mode 1, to mirror the main OS drive, and the data drive on the second channel.

The laptops and desktops also save the email address books and email files every 4 hours, as well as saving the Firefox bookmark files at the same time. Those then get archived along with all the specified data files in the above mentioned process.

As well the desktop, router and LAN are on a UPS.

Does all that qualify for paranoid? 

[Squirl]

The question is what will the technology be to read it in 10 years?  At least you will be able to recycle them.

[MountainDon]

I keep an old machine of whatever it is until I have converted or copied everything to the new media. That's the nice thing about digital media; the quality doesn't get reduced like it did with regular audio and video tapes. I only recycled the old Sony Beta VCR after I got rid of the Sony Betacam about 8 years ago.